Soft upgrade limitations

Soft upgrade allows you to run a newer version of Derby against
an existing database without having to fully upgrade the database. This means
that you can continue to run an older version of Derby against
the database.

If you perform a soft upgrade, you will not be able to perform
certain functions that are not available in older versions of
Derby. Specifically, new
features that affect the structure of a database are not available with a soft
upgrade. For a list of the new features in a release, see the Release Notes for
that release.

To perform a soft upgrade on a database created using an earlier version of
Derby, simply connect to the
database, as shown in the following example: